You may have noticed a certain air about these parts lately. There's a definite feeling of "You can do this!" and "Change the world!" and "We've gotta try!" and yadda yadda yadda and blah blah blah and all the rest. I've been aiming to motivate and inspire and to get people to respond and to start conversations and to change the world.
It's because I'm the one who needs the motivation. I'm the one with the ever-growing butt that won't get off this ever-sagging couch unless I find the reasons to do so. It's so much easier not to care about things. Having an opinion all the time is so much more exhausting.

But what kind of life would that be? To look back and to realize I never fought for what I believe. Never stood up for anything that needed standing. Never felt something or did something or said something just because I could. I want to be impassioned so I have to write like I am. One of the first things you learn in basketball camp is that you fake a shot before you try to make one.

I write these words and stories because I want to live words and stories. I want to feel the coming alive I see in all my favorite movies. Garden State. (500) Days of Summer. Even something silly like Zombieland. All of these movies are about characters who were once dead (metaphorically though) and find a way to life. They have reasons not to be alive (death of a mother and prescription drugs, the loss of love, a zombie apocalypse), but they find their way there anyway.

That's what I need. That's the story I want to live. That's why I try so hard to be motivating and inspiring here. Because I need to be. Not because any of you need it. Because I need it.

I need to discover my voice that has the same effect on me that those movies do. I need to find it within myself to stir me towards the life I want to live. I can't keep looking externally for that motivation. So instead, I try to find it internally and put it out to the world. Maybe some of you will have a use for it too. If not, hey, I paid for this website anyway. I'm going to get my mileage out of it.

It's likely that some of you find what I do here to be trivial. I think it that way sometimes too, but I also know that the character I'm becoming in this story of mine isn't the same one I would've found myself playing just five years ago and certainly not five years before that. I have to believe that what I do here has some value, if only to me.

And it's always the things that we think are the most personal that end up being the most universal.